Applied POSIWID - #SolutionsWatch

0:00Thank you, Larkin and Amanda, and thank you to everyone for coming to this approaching humanity celebration today. In case you don't know me, I'm James Corbett of CorbettReport.com, and Amanda and Larkin were kind enough to invite me here to join you today to discuss an important topic, Puzzle Wood. What? You've never heard of Puzzle Wood before? Then you haven't been following the Corbett report. If you want to get caught up to speed on Puzzle Wood, you can see episode 499 of the Corbett report podcast. The purpose of a system is what it does. But come with me, and I'll give you the long story short. This is Stafford Beer. Actually to be more accurate, this is Stafford Beer in full on professorial business manager mode. This is what Stafford Beer looked like most of the time.

1:00Is that beer or beard? Anyway, you could say he's a pretty unconventional guy. The Bastion of Truthiness, Wikipedia, describes him as a British theorist consultant and professor at Manchester Business School. But that really begins to scratch the surface of his esoteric exploration in the field of management cybernetics. In fact, his involvement with Project Cyber Synn in Ianday's Chile, complete with a Star Trek-inspired retro-futuristic command room for the technocrats to oversee the Chilean economy in real time, is probably worth an exploration in and of itself. But today we're going to discuss something different. Puzzle Wood. Puzzle Wood comes from Stafford Beer's 1979 book, The Heart of Enterprise. It stands for The Purpose of a System is What It Does. You see, as a researcher in cybernetics management, beer was fundamentally interested in systems

2:02and how they work. Or how they failed to work. He gives the example of a time he was living in London and bought a luxury car that promptly proceeded to fall apart piece by piece as soon as he drove it off the lot. First a door handle came off, then a windshield wiper next the odometer gauge. Despite all the servicing stations for this car, having a mutual agreement to supply each other with spare parts, he was unable to get the last missing part before the next one broke off. And as a good systems engineer, Beer decided to take his complaint to the source. I wrote to the managing director of the manufacturing company to point out that the system for spare part provisioning did not work. He disagreed. He said that there was nothing the matter with the system. I am of the opinion that our system is efficient and that it only fails to maintain availability due to manufacturing conditions or outside deficiencies. What is the nature and what is the purpose of a spare parts provisioning system and what are its boundaries and if we may know the purpose of a system by what it does, then what

3:07did this system actually do? From my point of view, it was a system for not supplying spare parts. From the managing director's point of view, it must have had a different purpose, minimizing the capital tied up in spare parts perhaps. In any case, the nature of the system was certainly a subjective affair. Beer's observation is deceptively simple. Determining the nature of a system is a subjective affair. The manager of the manufacturing company might have one explanation of a system's purpose, but that isn't necessarily reflective of any observable reality. If we completely ignore what a system's designer or its owner or its defender or its proponent has to say and look at what the system actually does, we can see the objective reality of that system. Okay, all right. You get the idea. But who cares about car parts suppliers? Let's look at some more consequential systems.

4:09Like the war on terror. You know, the wars of aggression waged primarily in the Middle East in the name of 9-11. What was the purpose of the war on terror? George W. Bush tried to define it by its supposed end goal. Our war on terror begins without cada, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. But let's not take his word for it. Instead, posi-wid. The purpose of a system is what it does. So what did the war on terror actually do? It killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. It cost the US over $8 trillion, and it actually led to the rise of more violent and extreme terror groups. So, the purpose of the war on terror was to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, transfer $8 trillion from US taxpayers to the military industrial complex, and increase

5:13violent terrorism. The purpose of a system is what it does. Or let's look at the war on drugs. Everyone remembers when Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971. So the purpose of the war on drugs was to fight and defeat the enemy of drug abuse. But what does the war on drugs actually do? It has incarcerated nearly 1 million people per year for drug offenses. It has cost an estimated $1 trillion, and it has resulted in an increase in drug abuse. Thus, the purpose of the system called the war on drugs is to incarcerate a million people a year, divert a trillion dollars into the prison industrial complex, and increase drug abuse. The purpose of a system is what it does.

6:16OK, one more example. How about the war on poverty? And this administration today here and now declares unconditional war on poverty in America. Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and above all, to prevent. So the stated purpose of the war on poverty was to cure and prevent poverty. But what has it actually done? It has created a web of nearly 100 interrelated welfare programs spread across 14 government departments and agencies and nine budget functions that spend over a trillion dollars a year on various federal welfare programs. And the result of these programs is that there is a greater percentage of the American population living in poverty than there was when the war was launched. So the purpose of the war on poverty is to create a vast bureaucratic infrastructure transfer

7:20a trillion dollars a year from taxpayers to bureaucrats, middlemen and welfare recipients, and to keep a greater and greater percentage of the population dependent on those handouts. The purpose of the system is what it does. Simple, right? And straightforward. It takes the guesswork and the subjectivity and the, but we had good intentions out of the equation and it gets to the heart of the matter. So, are you ready to try it yourself? All right, come with me. So, let's test. What was the purpose of the American Revolution? Did it lead to freedom, prosperity and happiness as the founding fathers supposedly intended? Or has it resulted in the creation of the largest, most deadly, most dead-a-hungry, privacy-invading technocratically empowered empire in the history of the world? What was the purpose of MAGA? Did it make America great again? Or has it resulted in an even stupider and more meaningless war in the Middle East,

8:24on the behalf of Israel? The expansion of the technocratic surveillance state, the growth of the military industrial artificial intelligence complex, increased government protection for Monsanto and buyer in their poisoning of Americans and the world, the hardwiring of the stablecoin scam and the polymarket scam into law, and the systematic cover-up of the Epstein network. The purpose of a system is what it does. What is the purpose of voting? Is it to make the people's voice heard as the hope and changes believed when they voted for Obama in 2008, or the MAGA die-hards believed when they voted for Trump in 2024, or the pacifists believed in 1916 when they voted for Wilson because he kept us out of war? Or is it to provide the populace of the state with the comforting idea that they have any control whatsoever over a system that is fundamentally made for and by oligarchs? Finally, here's the most important question of all, and I invite you to apply everything

9:30you've learned here today to solve this question. What is the purpose of the state? While you ponder that, I'm going to assert my freedom as an unbound individual, and I'm going to start approaching humanity. I hope you'll join me soon. James Corvett, CorvettReport.com.